Human rights abuses carried out by MKO leaders against
dissident members ranged from prolonged incommunicado and solitary confinement
to beatings, verbal and psychological abuse, coerced confessions, threats of
execution, and torture that in two cases led to death.

The testimonies of the former MKO members indicate that the
organization used three types of detention facilities inside its camps in Iraq. The interviewees described one type as small residential units, referred to as
guesthouses (mihmansara), inside the camps. The MKO members who
requested to leave the organization were held in these units during much of which
time they were kept incommunicado. They were not allowed to leave the premises
of their unit, to meet or talk with anyone else in the camp, or to contact
their relatives and friends in the outside world.

Karim Haqi, a former high ranking MKO member who served as
the head of security for Masoud Rajavi, told Human Rights Watch:

I was the head of security for Masoud Rajavi in 1991.
They could not believe that I wanted to separate from the organization. I was
confined inside a building called Iskan together with my wife and our
six month old child. Iskan was the site of a series of residential units
that used to house married couples before ideological divorces were mandated.
The organization had raised a tall wall around this area. Its interior
perimeter was protected by barbed wire, and guards kept it under surveillance
from observation towers. While we were under detention, the organization
reduced our food rations, subjected us to beatings and verbal abuses and also
intimidated us by making threats of executions.41

Mohammad Reza Eskandari and his wife Tahereh Eskandari, two
former members of the MKO, also told Human Rights Watch of being detained
inside various guest houses after requesting to leave the MKO in 1991:

The organization had taken our passports and
identification documents upon our arrival in the camp. When we expressed our
intention to leave, they never returned our documents. We were held in detention
centers in Iskan as well as other locations. We were sent to a refugee
camp outside the city of Ramadi called al-Tash. Life in al-Tash was extremely
harsh, more like a process of gradual death. The MKO operatives continued to
harass us even in Al-Tash. Eventually in September 1992, we received refugee
status from Holland and were able to leave al-Tash.42

The second type of detention inside the MKO camps was called
bangali shodan by the witnesses, referring to solitary confinement
inside a small pre-fabricated trailer room (bangal). Dissident members
who requested to leave the organization as well as ordinary members were
detained in the bangals. Detention inside a bangal was considered
a form of MKO punishment for members whom the leadership considered to have
made mistakes. They were expected to reflect on their mistakes and to write
self-criticism reports while in detention.

Masoud Banisadr, formerly the top diplomatic representative
of the MKO in Europe and North America, wrote of his experience of being
detained in a bangal when Masoud Rajavi and other high-ranking members
met with him and decided he had been corrupted:

Afterwards my masoul [supervisor] advised me to go
to a bungalow and think. I had become a bangali, which meant being put
in solitary confinement, ordered to do nothing but think and write. It was an
extreme kind of mental torture, and there were members who preferred to kill
themselves than to suffer it.43

The third type of detention reported by the witnesses
encompassed imprisonment, physical torture and interrogations inside secret
prisons within the MKO camps. These prisons were primarily used for persecution
of political dissidents. Their existence was unknown to most members. The
witnesses who suffered under this form of detention told Human Rights Watch
that they were unaware that the organization maintained such prisons until they
experienced it firsthand.

One of the witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch,
Mohammad Hussein Sobhani, spent eight-and-a-half years in solitary confinement,
from September 1992 to January 2001, inside the MKO camps. Another witness,
Javaheri-Yar, underwent five years of solitary confinement in the MKO prisons,
from November 1995 to December 2000. Both were high-ranking members who
intended to leave the organization but were told that, because of their
extensive inside knowledge, they could not be allowed to do so. They were
imprisoned and eventually transferred to the Iraqi authorities, who then held
them in Abu Ghraib.

Four other witnesses Human Rights Watch interviewed were
detained during the security clearances of 1994-1995 because they were
suspected by the MKO of harboring dissident views. Ali Ghasghavi, Alireza Mir
Asgari, Ali Akbari, and Abbas Sadeghinejad were severely tortured, subjected to
harsh interrogation techniques and forced to sign false confessions stating
their links to Iranian intelligence agents.

Abbas Sadeghinejad, Ali Ghashghavi, and Alireza Mir Asgari,
three former members of MKO interviewed by Human Rights Watch, witnessed the
death of Parviz Ahmadi in February 1995 inside an internal MKO prison in Iraq.44 The three
shared a prison cell during the security clearance arrests in February 1995.
Parviz Ahmadi was a dissident member who was held in the same cell. Ali
Ghashghavi told Human Rights Watch that Parviz Ahmadi was taken for
interrogations on his second day of being held in the prison cell:

It was the start of Ramadan [February 1995] when the
prison guards came to fetch Parviz Ahmadi. He was gone for a couple of hours.
When they brought him back he was badly beaten and died soon afterwards.

Abbas Sadeghinezhad, who was also present in the cell,
recalled the final moments of Parviz Ahmadis life:

The prison door opened, and a prisoner was thrown into
the cell. He fell on his face. At first we didnt recognize him. He was beaten
up severely. We turned him around; it was Parviz Ahmadi taken for
interrogations just a few hours before. Ahmadi was a unit commander. His bones
were broken all over, his legs were inflamed; he was falling into a coma. We
tried to help him but after only ten minutes he died as I was holding his head
on my lap. The prison guard opened the door and pulled Ahmadis lifeless body
out.45

Alireza Mir Asgari, who was also present, corroborated the
circumstances of Parviz Ahmadis death.46 In contrast, the MKOs
publication Mojahed of March 2, 1998, lists Parviz Ahmadi as an MKO
martyr killed by Iranian intelligence agents.47

Abbas Sadeghinejad told Human Rights Watch that he had
earlier witnessed the death of another prisoner, Ghorbanali Torabi, after Torabi
was returned from an interrogation session to a prison cell that he shared with
Sadeghinejad.48